MUSIC SCENE: U2 goes back to the fire with Joshua Tree's 30th anniversary tour

Monday

Jun 26, 2017 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2017 at 9:31 AM

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

During the introduction to “Trip Through Your Wires,” one of those unjustifiably lesser-known numbers from “The Joshua Tree” album, U2 lead singer Bono was telling the soldout crowd of about 60,000 at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro Sunday night what a role Boston had played in their career.

“Playing for the first time at The Paradise, before about 250 people, was where our love affair with America began,” he said, before quickly adding a self-deprecating “Some things haven’t changed ... I still can’t play the Hohner (harmonica).”

Actually Bono’s harmonica work was pretty good on that song and a couple others, but the larger point is that “The Joshua Tree” is actually kind of the manifestation of that love affair with the USA, in all its glories and all its flaws. That record is what really broke U2 through to wide popularity. The current tour celebrates the 30th anniversary of that 1987 album, and features the band playing it front-to-back, along with a selection of their other music, and it is easy to see that album was a point when the band’s identity as crusaders for human rights, justice, equality and compassion really took hold. Those are all qualities and aspirations it seems impossible to oppose, but three decades after that landmark record, we appear to need reminders more than ever.

Technically, the stage set was fairly basic, with a big, roughly 35 feet high stage set up in the south end zone, while ramps led down to a satellite stage that extended out onto the field to about the 50-yard line. Backing the stage was a massive video screen, scrolled out in sections like a strip of film, and measuring, we are told, 200-by-45 feet. For most of the night that screen showed black and white, and then color films of American landscapes and people, illustrating the songs being played, and the images were clear and striking. Our seats were close to the left side, so it was a bit hard to see all of the images, and the musicians were often dwarfed in front of the mega-screens, even if we were quite close. You’d have to wonder how well that visual production worked further away.

Sound-wise, that 1987 album, and much of the music played over Sunday night’s two-hours hearkened back to the band’s earliest days, where raw passion and intensity, and some punk-rock influence, trumped the sonic innovations of their later work. The Edge is still a marvelously inventive guitarist capable of extracting all manner of effects out of his axe, and the rhythm section is still a potent force of nature, without all the enhanced special effects of later years.

The 22-song set opened with a four-tune jolt of classic U2, as the band casually ambled out to the satellite stage at midfield. If the serrating guitar chords of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” have ever sounded more striking, we won’t believe it. But the thrilling guitar-and-keyboard work of The Edge on “New Year’s Day” was extraordinary, as the band succeeded in making that number both subtle and insistent, a rhythm and melody that quickly seeped into your bones. The lively “Bad” with its entreaty “let it go” built to a steamy peak, and then descended as Bono sang a snippet of Paul Simon’s “America.”

U2’s version of “Pride (In the Name of Love),” their 1984 ode to the Rev. Martin Luther King and his philosophy, was a predictably fiery soul-rocker. But as Bono took a mid-song moment to reflect and, laudably, urge us all towards unity, “to find common ground, in search of higher ground,” as the song resumed, the very next line was “a shot rings out in the Memphis sky ...” Can you say cognitive dissonance? It evoked memories of George Carlin’s tragicomic line about what this country does to all its peacemakers, and was a little deflating, but let’s give them a mulligan on that one. If U2 can get 60,000 folks thinking about “higher ground” and idealism for even a few hours, more power to them.

Those four songs were a prime appetizer for “The Joshua Tree,” which blasted off – with the band back on the main stage – with a 60,000 strong sing-along take on “Where The Streets Have No Name.” Lovely color forest views on the video screens helped make “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” a delight, and it felt as though the band played it a bit slower and more wistfully. “With or Without You” – another mass sing-along effort – completed that powerful opening trilogy of tunes from “The Joshua Tree,” and the latter two were U2’s only number one singles in America.

That record had many other treats however, as “Bullet the Blue Sky,” which examines U.S. wars and engagements, proved with its dizzying swirl of imagery and pounding dynamics. “Running to Stand Still” supposedly referenced Dublin’s heroin epidemic in the 1980s – how sad that issue is still with us –and that tune was done as a mostly acoustic ballad, with some evocative harmonica from Bono. The rootsy “Red Hill Mining Town” featured a Salvation Army horn section – 15 strong – accompanying the quartet via the video screens, and what we heard was so seamlessly produced you wondered if the horns were really backstage.

Bono, still the driving force of the band at 57, sang “In God’s Country” just a little behind the beat, for a more soulful interpretation, as The Edge and the rest of the band turned its jittery melody into a caffeinated sprint. After that nod to The Paradise and Beantown, “Tripping Through Your Wires” came across as a midtempo, bluesy reverie, which nonetheless slowly built to a fiery crescendo.

One moving moment in the night came when Bono paid tribute to Martin Richard, and noted that the youngster who’d died in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 would never be forgotten by his family, who were in attendance. “There’s no end to grief, so we know there’s no end to love,” Bono said, before beginning a sensitive reading of “One Tree Hill.” After some dazzling guitar pyrotechnics on “Exit,” the last cut from “The Joshua Tree” was “Mothers of the Disappeared,” a song inspired by Bono’s mid-80s trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador. That song was a emotional midtempo rocker, as mothers whose families had been ripped apart by death squads were lined up on the video screens – again, it was kind of stunning to realize such things are still happening.

“These songs are as much yours as ours,” Bono said, as the band saluted the throng. “Thank you for giving us a great life.” But of course there would be encores, seven more songs in fact.

The first encore song was kind of laidback, comparatively. “Miss Sarajevo” is often referred to as a “cover song” from Passengers. But since Passengers is simply U2 with Brian Eno, this 1995 tune is pretty much U2, in an impressionistic look at the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, with a guest appearance, on tape, of Luciano Pavarotti for an operatic interlude. That was interesting, if perhaps too much a change of pace.

Recorded excerpts of a John F. Kennedy speech about always striving to make America “a city on a hill” introduced a pulse-pounding “Beautiful Day,” in a rendition so dynamic and exciting even Patriots owner Bob Kraft was out of his front row seat in section 112. (Jonathan Kraft was on his feet cheering most of the night). The whipsaw guitar lines of “Elevation” kept that furious pace going, and the “Vertigo” that followed was positively wild – even with that 60,000 voice choir for the choruses.

A quick double-shot from the band’s old “Achtung Baby” record kept the fire going with “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” and then a sizzling “One.” The night ended with a new song, “The Little Things That Give You Away,” which could refer to a personal or universal matter, but was an appealing sampler of the band’s next new album. (“Songs of Experience” will be the next album, and it is mostly done, but on hold for this tour.)

The Lumineers opened with a tasty set of their acoustic based folk-rock, garnering a lot of support from the crowd filtering in. The Lumineers excel in that type of song structure that starts off soft and builds up to roaring crescendos, and songs like “Hey Ho” and “Cleopatra” have won them many fans. But Sunday night their 50-minute set was highlighted by more disparate colors, like the pounding intensity of “Dead Sea,” or the crazed oompah-band sound of “Big Parade.” Their song “Angela” might have been a primer for their own little genre, beginning as a quiet acoustic ballad and growing gradually into a thumping folk-rocker, and their rousing final anthem, “Stubborn Love,” showed The Lumineers may have been influenced a bit by U2 also.